Vegetarian menu sections can encourage meat eating

RESTAURANTS that include specific vegetarian sections on their menus may be inadvertently encouraging customers to eat meat, a study found.

Although it seems counterintuitive, the London School of Economics (LSE) found that if non-meat dishes are included amid the main courses, they are chosen more often.

Linda Bacon, one of the study’s authors, said: “Our findings suggest that while certain restaurant menu designs can encourage some consumers to make pro-environmental food choices, they can have the opposite effect on others.”

The study, published in the journal Appetite, involved 750 people, half of whom frequently ate vegetarian food and half whom rarely ate it. No vegans or vegetarians were included. They were given different menus and asked to choose a meal as if they were eating out with friends.

Placing vegetarian dishes in a separate section did not have a significant effect on the choices made by infrequent vegetarian food eaters. But it did have a notable effect on the frequent eaters, lowering their chance of picking a vegetarian option by 65 per cent.

The researchers suggest that this backfiring effect may be down to “moral licensing”.

Having behaved in way that is considered healthy or morally desirable someone may subsequently feel “licensed” to make a less healthy/morally desirable choice.

So restaurant menus that emphasise vegetarian meals may remind the frequent vegetarian food-eaters that they have already engaged in this seemingly morally valuable food choice on many occasions, allowing them to select meat or fish instead.